by Phoebe North
A sharp scent hit me, putrid and slimy. But there was that music. It wore me down until I was tender, until my heart felt raw in my chest. I stepped forward along the stone floor. The fall of my flight boots was as quiet as rustling paper, drowned out beneath the sound of that voice. It told me about my mother, her limbs all tangled up with Benjamin Jacobi’s—the dead librarian, her lover. It told me about the hope in his eyes the last time we ever spoke, the day I got my vocation. Like he was examining me for any sign, however small, of her.
Inside the house the air was chilly. There was a long counter, illuminated by a pair of horn-shaped lights. They swayed from their chains, casting sinister shadows on the floor. Beneath them were sides of meat hacked up into pieces; the spaces between the limbs were slick with green blood. In front of the counter sat an Ahadizhi man. He sang as he worked his double-bladed cleaver into them, slicing massive limbs into smaller and smaller portions.
But that song, that song—it told me about what was supposed to have been my wedding night, when I’d answered that final, lingering question. I could have married Silvan Rafferty, could have given him my heart even if I would have never cherished his. I could have been normal, in a way. But I hadn’t done it. And I wasn’t normal. I stepped closer. I wanted to wrap that music around me, pull it tight like a blanket.
Terra.
My head snapped up. Vadix. His voice, unmistakable. Tender and worried. Worried for me. I answered him without speaking, from a place deep inside me where there were no words. His voice came back at me again, stronger this time.
Terra, leave this place. It is not safe for you.
But I had nowhere left to go! No one understood me. No one but this singer, who despite his work—up to the elbows in blood, two glinting blades in hand—began to turn his head back toward me, hoping to get another look.
Terra, I understand you.
I felt something then: a jolt. Electric, sure, but there was a story in the current. Love, warmth. Separation. And then something else, a cleft that had torn his good senses away from him. Now there was only an ache, tender and throbbing. A curious sensation, like an itch, but worse. The desire to pull his skin away, to make his body weep. I stumbled backward through the front door, out into the blinding light of day again. There were footsteps insite the round house, calm, even. And a face. Smiling, but far from benevolent.
Terra, Vadix said. His words, in my head. How was it even possible? But I’d learned the possibility of many improbable things over the past few days. Him. Me. This city. Our dreams. Terra, run.
The Ahadizhi man reached out for me, but I jerked my hand away, gave my body a twist, and ran.
• • •
As I raced through the streets of Raza Ait, something changed. My body still dripped sweat like a faucet; my mind was still hazy from the heat. And yet the image of the roads before me split. I could see the cobblestone, the bridges, but a second image joined them. Memories. Vadix had walked these paths recently, heading from the quarantine camp to his own house. He’d seen the Ahadizhi turn toward him. Back then the word on their lips hadn’t been “human.” It had been smaller, simpler—and more cutting, too.
Lousk.
He’d turned a corner, and so did I. He’d let his body drift down a wide staircase, so I clutched the railing in hand and descended. Beneath the overpasses a whole wild forest grew. To the aliens it was nothing more than a park—dotted with purple leaves, full of flowers that glowed like lanterns. Vadix knew this place well; it was one of the only notes of joy in his thin, meager life. To me it was dazzling, full of color and movement and the sweet scent of new growth. I wanted to stop, to sit on one of the stone benches and watch fresh water drip down the face of a massive fountain. But I didn’t settle into the soft, cool dirt. I still had a ways to go yet: through the fruit grove up ahead.
The ground between the shivering trees was soft and black. The air was chilly, more fragrant than any I’d yet breathed on Zehava. I took a deep breath, held it in my lungs.
Vadix likes it here, I thought. It reminds him of the place where he’s meant to be.
I shook the thought from my head. It made no sense. It wasn’t mine to have. And yet I still marched on and on through the cool forest, toward the enclave of abandoned houses through the break in the trees. Because of his presence, strong and steady in my mind, I knew that those houses were some of the oldest in the city. First came the senate, then the funerary fields, then the winter caves. Then these small abodes, made from hand out of alabaster earth and glass. They’d housed the first Ahadizhi, before they sprouted child after child and outgrew the round walls. The hunters had abandoned the houses like old, ill-fitting clothes when they headed for the new buildings above. Now most of the hollow lumps of clay were dark. Their doors hung open on their hinges with only blackness shining out into the afternoon. But I knew that there would be one that was still well kept, inhabited. It was the oldest, the largest. It had belonged to the first Ahadizhi senator. For the time it had been a grand accommodation. Shaped like a nautilus, the house had a thousand shards of colored glass pressed into her walls—a thousand tiny windows into the life inside. As I drew near, my steps slowed. There was a light on somewhere, and it made the flints of green and blue and gold gleam.
I stood in the shadow of the house, breathing hard. I had come through the wild alien city, half baked by the sun and utterly lost. And I had found it—the multifaceted jewel in all this darkness. The house. His house. I wanted to cry at the sight of it, but I was too tired, too spent. Instead I just stood, my mouth open. I was dirty and tired. My flight boot had worn a blister in my heel. But I was alive. Whole. And here.
The door clicked open. There was Vadix, his dark skin looking almost black in this dim light. He’d taken off his outer robes. Now he wore only a pair of trousers whose lengths were embroidered with sparkling threads. Decorative flowers trailed along the lengths of his limbs like roses on a trellis. His body shone, freshly washed, still damp from the shower. But his chest was not the smooth blue plane I’d seen in dreams. He was covered with dozens of pale scars, every one the exact width of his own fingers. I saw a flash in my mind’s eye: Vadix, alone at night, using his bare hands to rend his skin open again and again and again.
Maybe I should have had a speech prepared. In the stories Rebbe Davison read us when we were young, there was always a speech. The young shepherd comes for the princess and tells his story. It may be that I am bewitched, or dreaming, for my adventure passes all belief. But I had no pretty words. I only pulled my tired body up the wide front steps, hung my head, and said:
“I came. You told me where to go, and I came. Here I am.”
Vadix’s response sounded choked, almost painful, like he didn’t want to force the words past the bounds of his scar-strewn torso. “You were in danger. I couldn’t bear to lose you. I will not survive such a loss again.”
I still avoided his eyes. It felt like something strange might happen if I met them, something beyond my control.
“You told me you didn’t want me,” I said. “You told me—”
“I was afraid. This has never happened. These bonds exist only for Xollu. Not Ahadizhi, much less a beast.”
I flinched at the word; he let out a thrum of sound. A sigh, or something like it.
“I do not understand your nature, Terra. It is as foreign to me as the nature of the Ahadizhi. They hunt too, but they are not all bad. They taste flesh. Have strange passions. But they are kind. Clever. Passionate. You are these things too. I am assured. Do not ask me why.”
His mouth quivered. I wanted to press my lips to his, to still them. But I didn’t, not yet. Did aliens even know how to kiss?
“All those dreams, for all those months,” I said, my chest fluttering. “At first I thought they were dreams like the other girls had. About boys, you know? But then I realized they were different. I felt—I felt like a freak, Vadix. Wrong.”
“Perhaps it is wrong.”
“It doe
sn’t feel wrong,” I blurted. And then my eyes met his. I could have clamped my hands over my mouth, taking my words back, holding them in. But I didn’t want to. Instead I watched him. He pressed his fearful lips together and was still for a long moment. Then he smiled. A slow, warm smile.
“No,” he agreed. “It does not feel wrong. It does not feel wrong at all.”
His words were small and simple, just as plain as any others. But they were all I needed. My heart open, my eyes open, too, I reached out for him.
He caught me. Our bodies touched. For the first time in the flesh, I felt right. Happy. Whole.
17
Sometimes it seems to me that there are two types of love. The first starts small—like a drop of pigment against a wrinkled page. At first it looks like nothing but a smudge of color, stark against white. But then you add to it: a laugh, a conversation, the way that he kisses you. One brushstroke after another. Like art it fills the paper slowly until the image is undeniable. On the ship most marriages worked out like that. As we grew older, we hoped for friendships that would slowly flower into something else—by then too world-weary to expect the passionate embraces that had been promised to us in stories and in dreams.
And that was the other love, the sort we whispered of in the school yard, bright as sex and twice as dangerous. A love that caught fire like a match in the darkness, ready to burn oxygen, our lungs, our lives. Bashert, bashert, we whispered, half afraid we would find it was someday true. Because it was a risk, wasn’t it? To love hot and ask questions later. We wanted it, but we didn’t want it. By the time I’d found Vadix, I was sixteen—old enough, really, to know better.
But sometimes you need a forest fire to clear the ground for new growth. Mara had taught me that long ago—a lesson she’d hoped I’d use on our new planet, though I don’t imagine that she ever meant it this way. Vadix and I stumbled back toward his bedroom, heading straight for the round bed at the center. He peeled my clothes off as we went, leaving one dirty layer after another in a pile on the floor. His hands were long, familiar. I found in them a thousand tender mercies. They graced bare skin, caressed my rib cage and my belly. Electricity arced and flickered between us. How could I have ever doubted my own worth? Because no matter what Abba had said—and Aleksandra, and Mazdin Rafferty, and so many others—he found me worthy, urging me to love and love and never leave.
I kissed every uncountable scar. There were so many of them that soon I was dizzy, desperate for air. He laced fingers through the matted locks of my hair, drew me closer and closer still. I thought of the vines curling around one another in the forest, desperate to make their parts meet. I empathized. Why couldn’t we just have one body, one mind? It seemed to me a grave injustice that we had been born separate, different, that we had wasted so much time so far away from each other. That afternoon and into the deep golden evening, I endeavored to correct that. We would be one. Whole. Formidable. A new sort of creature.
The forest burned, but anyone who tells you that nothing is left in its wake has never felt what I’ve felt, has never seen the green promise of new growth turning up its head toward the sun—all in a darkened world of char and ash.
• • •
A funny thing happened that night, as we tumbled together and apart and together again. Our thoughts mingled, becoming one. I couldn’t tell you where I ended and he began. I wasn’t even sure whether we slept, tussling in the dreamforests, or whether we were awake, breathing, my heart pounding against his still chest. Mostly we spoke without speaking, without even words.
Love? I would ask, the question merely a flash of color in the dawning darkness, and his answer came back surely and swiftly: Love. Vines blossoming in the forest, furling out in wild curlicues, color, and color, and life.
It was a crazy thing to ask—a crazy answer, too. We hardly knew each other. And the future was uncertain. There was no room for us here. No room, even, for me. In a rare moment of respite that night, I turned my face up, peeling back the covers. The ceiling overhead was made of glass, so clear it might as well have been transparent. We were near the heart of the city, not far from the senate where our day had begun. If we went any deeper, we’d be underground—heading toward the funerary fields and the caves where the Xollu slept their long winters away. I knew this but didn’t know it. I knew it because it was his life, his truth. But staring up at the leaves that crowded the edges of the glass, and the stars that twinkled far, far above, past the translucent cupola, I wondered what all of these things meant. The truth was, I wasn’t used to being happy, and certainly not for long. The sadness began drifting back almost as quickly as we’d chased it away.
The strange, familiar solitude washed over me. I pointed up at a star that was silver and still in the sky above. It looked familiar, and then I realized the difference. The other stars twinkled, filtered through the atmosphere. This star shone steadily, like the stars through the ship’s glass once had.
“What’s that?” I asked. Vadix turned to me, a plush round pillow wedged between his arm and face. He pressed his face into it, blinking slowly, smiling.
“This is your ship. What is her name?”
“Asherah.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Ash-er-rahhh.” He drew out the syllables, luxuriating in their foreign sound. But then his expression changed, weighted by his sadness. If there was one thing I was to learn about Vadix that night, it was that he wasn’t used to being happy either.
“I used to know not what name to curse. That star, burning steadily above. When it appeared weeks ago, our people flung out wild theories. It was a bad portent. It was a sign from the god and the goddess. It was a satellite, come to steal our technologies, sent by sinister . . .” A pause. His smile returned, wide, showing all those minuscule teeth. “Aliens.”
“I’m not an alien,” I said. I reached out, cupping my hand against his smooth cheek. “You’re an alien.”
“You are alien to this planet.”
“But not to you.” I drew close, pressing my lips against his. I think it surprised him, the warmth and wetness of my open mouth. But after a moment his cool body softened, leaning in. Our first kiss, gentle, tender—and as long as the night.
His round bed was the perfect size and shape for two long bodies. But I kept myself snuggled close to him. His half of the mattress was bowed beneath his weight—he’d spent too many nights in it alone. I let my fingers trace the scars over his shoulders. Some were old, deep, and faded into his skin. But some were white, new, raw. For the hundredth time that night, I pressed my lips to one, tasting sweet sap. I wished I still believed that kisses could heal like I had when I was a child. But I knew better now. No kisses would heal this.
I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t make the words come to my lips. So I spoke without speaking, the way we had in dreams.
You did this to yourself, didn’t you? I asked. I felt him shift so he could see me better. He was surprised, I think, to hear my voice so clear in his mind, but also pleased. This speech was as natural to him as breathing was to me.
I am a lousk, he said, as if that explained it. I drew myself up, putting my hand flat against his chest. It seemed so strange against his skin, so solid.
I don’t know what that means.
“Every spring seedlings sprout from their parents’ bodies,” he said, slipping into real speech as easily as one slipped into a new set of clothes. “Thousands of them. The funerary fields are full of light and joy. From our first conscious moments we are paired. Those who are alone wither and die. They are the first lousk. But most survive, thrive in our crèches. Never lonely. Never wanting companionship. Best friends. At night we walk in the dreamforests together, where we are one body and thought and mind.”
“Bashert,” I said. “Mate.”
Vadix nodded, the motion small and quick, his eyes still fixed fast on me.
“Zeze,” he said. “That is our word for it. God and goddess willing, we live long, happy lives. Working. Mating. Praying. Learni
ng. Until our zeze dies. Then we are a lousk.”
“Widower,” I said. “That’s what we call it. Abba—my father—he was alone after my mother died. A widower.”
His hand was utterly still on top of mine.
“Velsa,” he said at last. “Her name was Velsa. We were always different from the rest. Brave. Ambitious. We did not like how crowded our cities had become. We wished to settle the southern lands, to build a city there. But no northern Ahadizhi would stray that far from their sprouting fields to join us, and no Xollu has ever shared words with the Ahadizhi in the south. We knew we needed to broker peace if they were to be our Guardians, to keep us safe in the long winters when we sleep and the animals roam.”
“You wanted to make a new city. For you and her.”
I saw it in his mind’s eye: nights spent whispering to each other though they lay a thousand kilometers apart. They would build their own empire, new and beautiful. Because they were young and brave. They would settle new ground, something that the Xollu hadn’t done for centuries.
“Yes. We were foolish, proud. I would be the translator, speaking the tongue of the southern Ahadizhi. She would learn diplomacy. I went to school in the south, in Aisak Ait. And she stayed here. They all said we were crazy, to live our young lives apart like lousku.”
He sat up, draping his arms around his knees. I wanted to touch him, to wrap my arms around him again and draw him close. But I knew better. It hurt too much. He was still too raw. “Velsa—Velsa died. There were riots when your people sent their first probe. The Xollu were afraid—the Ahadizhi determined to protect us from the danger. I did not see this. I was far, far away.”